by Saki
Gorworth, to whom he unburdened himself in private, gave him the same counsel as theretofore.
‘Invent something.’
‘Yes, but what?’
The ready affirmative coupled with the question betrayed a significant shifting of the ethical standpoint.
It was a few days later that Blenkinthrope revealed a chapter of family history to the customary gathering in the railway carriage.
‘Curious thing happened to my aunt, the one who lives in Paris,’ he began. He had several aunts, but they were all geographically distributed over Greater London.
‘She was sitting on a seat in the Bois the other afternoon, after lunching at the Roumanian Legation.’
Whatever the story gained in picturesqueness for the dragging in of diplomatic ‘atmosphere,’ it ceased from that moment to command any acceptance as a record of current events. Gorworth had warned his neophyte that this would be the case, but the traditional enthusiasm of the neophyte had triumphed over discretion.
‘She was feeling rather drowsy, the effect probably of the champagne, which she’s not in the habit of taking in the middle of the day.’
A subdued murmur of admiration went round the company. Blenkinthrope’s aunts were not used to taking champagne in the middle of the year, regarding it exclusively as a Christmas and New Year accessory.
‘Presently a rather portly gentleman passed by her seat and paused an instant to light a cigar. At that moment a youngish man came up behind him, drew the blade from a swordstick, and stabbed him half a dozen times through and through. “Scoundrel,” he cried to his victim, “you do not know me. My name is Henri Leturc.” The elder man wiped away some of the blood that was spattering his clothes, turned to his assailant, and said: “And since when has an attempted assassination been considered an introduction.” Then he finished lighting his cigar and walked away. My aunt had intended screaming for the police, but seeing the indifference with which the principal in the affair treated the matter she felt that it would be an impertinence on her part to interfere. Of course I need hardly say she put the whole thing down to the effects of a warm, drowsy afternoon and the Legation champagne. Now comes the astonishing part of my story. A fortnight later a bank manager was stabbed to death with a swordstick in that very part of the Bois. His assassin was the son of a charwoman formerly working at the bank, who had been dismissed from her job by the manager on account of chronic intemperance. His name was Henri Leturc.’
From that moment Blenkinthrope was tacitly accepted as the Munchausen of the party. No effort was spared to draw him out from day to day in the exercise of testing their powers of credulity, and Blenkinthrope, in the false security of an assured and receptive audience, waxed industrious and ingenious in supplying the demand for marvels. Duckby’s satirical story of a tame otter that had a tank in the garden to swim in, and whined restlessly whenever the water-rate was overdue, was scarcely an unfair parody of some of Blenkinthrope’s wilder efforts. And then one day came Nemesis.
Returning to his villa one evening Blenkinthrope found his wife sitting in front of a pack of cards, which she was scrutinising with unusual concentration.
‘The same old patience-game?’ he asked carelessly.
‘No, dear; this is the Death’s Head patience, the most difficult of them all. I’ve never got it to work out, and somehow I should be rather frightened if I did. Mother only got it out once in her life; she was afraid of it, too. Her great-aunt had done it once and fallen dead from excitement the next moment, and mother always had a feeling that she would die if she ever got it out. She died the same night that she did it. She was in bad health at the time, certainly, but it was a strange coincidence.’
‘Don’t do it if it frightens you,’ was Blenkinthrope’s practical comment as he left the room. A few minutes later his wife called to him.
‘John, it gave me such a turn, I nearly got it out. Only the five of diamonds held me up at the end. I really thought I’d done it.’
‘Why, you can do it,’ said Blenkinthrope, who had come back to the room; ‘if you shift the eight of clubs on to that open nine the five can be moved on to the six.’
His wife made the suggested move with hasty, trembling fingers, and piled the outstanding cards on to their respective packs. Then she followed the example of her mother and great-grand-aunt.
Blenkinthrope had been genuinely fond of his wife, but in the midst of his bereavement one dominant thought obtruded itself. Something sensational and real had at last come into his life; no longer was it a grey, colourless record. The headlines which might appropriately describe his domestic tragedy kept shaping themselves in his brain. ‘Inherited presentiment comes true.’ ‘The Death’s Head patience: Card-game that justified its sinister name in three generations.’ He wrote out a full story of the fatal occurrence for the Essex Vedette, the editor of which was a friend of his, and to another friend he gave a condensed account, to be taken up to the office of one of the halfpenny dailies. But in both cases his reputation as a romancer stood fatally in the way of the fulfilment of his ambitions. ‘Not the right thing to be Munchausening in a time of sorrow,’ agreed his friends among themselves, and a brief note of regret at the ‘sudden death of the wife of our respected neighbour, Mr John Blenkinthrope, from heart failure’, appearing in the news column of the local paper was the forlorn outcome of his visions of widespread publicity.
Blenkinthrope shrank from the society of his erstwhile travelling companions and took to travelling townwards by an earlier train. He sometimes tries to enlist the sympathy and attention of a chance acquaintance in details of the whistling prowess of his best canary or the dimensions of his largest beetroot; he scarcely recognises himself as the man who was once spoken about and pointed out as the owner of the Seventh Pullet.
The Blind Spot
‘You’ve just come back from Adelaide’s funeral, haven’t you?’ said Sir Lulworth to his nephew; ‘I suppose it was very like most other funerals?’
‘I’ll tell you all about it at lunch,’ said Egbert.
‘You’ll do nothing of the sort. It wouldn’t be respectful either to your great-aunt’s memory or to the lunch. We begin with Spanish olives, then a borsch, then more olives and a bird of some kind, and a rather enticing Rhenish wine, not at all expensive as wines go in this country, but still quite laudable in its way. Now there’s absolutely nothing in that menu that harmonises in the least with the subject of your great-aunt Adelaide or her funeral. She was a charming woman, and quite as intelligent as she had any need to be, but somehow she always reminded me of an English cook’s idea of a Madras curry.’
‘She used to say you were frivolous,’ said Egbert. Something in his tone suggested that he rather endorsed the verdict.
‘I believe I once considerably scandalised her by declaring that clear soup was a more important factor in life than a clear conscience. She had very little sense of proportion. By the way, she made you her principal heir, didn’t she?’
‘Yes,’ said Egbert, ‘and executor as well. It’s in that connection that I particularly want to speak to you.’
‘Business is not my strong point at any time,’ said Sir Lulworth, ‘and certainly not when we’re on the immediate threshold of lunch.’
‘It isn’t exactly business,’ explained Egbert, as he followed his uncle into the dining-room. ‘It’s something rather serious. Very serious.’
‘Then we can’t possibly speak about it now,’ said Sir Lulworth; ‘no one could talk seriously, during a borsch. A beautifully constructed borsch, such as you are going to experience presently, ought not only to banish conversation but almost to annihilate thought. Later on, when we arrive at the second stage of olives, I shall be quite ready to discuss that new book on Borrow, or, if you prefer it, the present situation in the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg. But I absolutely decline to talk anything approaching business till we have finished with the bird.’
For the greater part of the meal Egbert sat in an abstracte
d silence, the silence of a man whose mind is focussed on one topic. When the coffee stage had been reached he launched himself suddenly athwart his uncle’s reminiscences of the Court of Luxemburg.
‘I think I told you that great-aunt Adelaide had made me her executor. There wasn’t very much to be done in the way of legal matters, but I had to go through her papers.’
‘That would be a fairly heavy task in itself. I should imagine there were reams of family letters.’
‘Stacks of them, and most of them highly uninteresting. There was one packet, however, which I thought might repay a careful perusal. It was a bundle of correspondence from her brother Peter.’
‘The Canon of tragic memory,’ said Lulworth.
‘Exactly, of tragic memory, as you say; a tragedy that has never been fathomed.’
‘Probably the simplest explanation was the correct one,’ said Sir Lulworth; ‘he slipped on the stone staircase and fractured his skull in falling.’
Egbert shook his head. ‘The medical evidence all went to prove that the blow on the head was struck by some one coming up behind him. A wound caused by violent contact with the steps could not possibly have been inflicted at that angle of the skull. They experimented with a dummy figure falling in every conceivable position.’
‘But the motive?’ exclaimed Sir Lulworth; ‘no one had any interest in doing away with him, and the number of people who destroy Canons of the Established Church for the mere fun of killing must be extremely limited. Of course there are individuals of weak mental balance who do that sort of thing, but they seldom conceal their handiwork; they are more generally inclined to parade it.’
‘His cook was under suspicion,’ said Egbert shortly.
‘I know he was,’ said Sir Lulworth, ‘simply because he was about the only person on the premises at the time of the tragedy. But could anything be sillier than trying to fasten a charge of murder on to Sebastien? He had nothing to gain, in fact, a good deal to lose, from the death of his employer. The Canon was paying him quite as good wages as I was able to offer him when I took him over into my service. I have since raised them to something a little more in accordance with his real worth, but at the time he was glad to find a new place without troubling about an increase of wages. People were fighting rather shy of him, and he had no friends in this country. No; if any one in the world was interested in the prolonged life and unimpaired digestion of the Canon it would certainly be Sebastien.’
‘People don’t always weigh the consequences of their rash acts,’ said Egbert, ‘otherwise there would be very few murders committed. Sebastien is a man of hot temper.’
‘He is a southerner,’ admitted Sir Lulworth; ‘to be geographically exact I believe he hails from the French slopes of the Pyrenees. I took that into consideration when he nearly killed the gardener’s boy the other day for bringing him a spurious substitute for sorrel. One must always make allowances for origin and locality and early environment; “Tell me your longitude and I’ll know what latitude to allow you” is my motto.’
‘There, you see,’ said Egbert, ‘he nearly killed the gardener’s boy.’
‘My dear Egbert, between nearly killing a gardener’s boy and altogether killing a Canon there is a wide difference. No doubt you have often felt a temporary desire to kill a gardener’s boy; you have never given way to it, and I respect you for your self-control. But I don’t suppose you have ever wanted to kill an octogenarian Canon. Besides, as far as we know, there had never been any quarrel or disagreement between the two men. The evidence at the inquest brought that out very clearly.’
‘Ah!’ said Egbert, with the air of a man coming at last into a deferred inheritance of conversational importance, ‘that is precisely what I want to speak to you about.’
He pushed away his coffee cup and drew a pocket-book from his inner breast-pocket. From the depths of the pocket-book he produced an envelope, and from the envelope he extracted a letter, closely written in a small, neat handwriting.
‘One of the Canon’s numerous letters to Aunt Adelaide,’ he explained, ‘written a few days before his death. Her memory was already failing when she received it, and I dare say she forgot the contents as soon as she had read it; otherwise, in the light of what subsequently happened, we should have heard something of this letter before now. If it had been produced at the inquest I fancy it would have made some difference in the course of affairs. The evidence, as you remarked just now, choked off suspicion against Sebastien by disclosing an utter absence of anything that could be considered a motive or provocation for the crime, if crime there was.’
‘Oh, read the letter,’ said Sir Lulworth impatiently.
‘It’s a long rambling affair, like most of his letters in his later years,’ said Egbert. ‘I’ll read the part that bears immediately on the mystery.
‘“I very much fear I shall have to get rid of Sebastien. He cooks divinely, but he has the temper of a fiend or an anthropoid ape, and I am really in bodily fear of him. We had a dispute the other day as to the correct sort of lunch to be served on Ash Wednesday, and I got so irritated and annoyed at his conceit and obstinacy that at last I threw a cupful of coffee in his face and called him at the same time an impudent jackanapes. Very little of the coffee went actually in his face, but I have never seen a human being show such deplorable lack of self-control. I laughed at the threat of killing me that he spluttered out in his rage, and thought the whole thing would blow over, but I have several times since caught him scowling and muttering in a highly unpleasant fashion, and lately I have fancied that he was dogging my footsteps about the grounds, particularly when I walk of an evening in the Italian Garden.’
‘It was on the steps in the Italian Garden that the body was found,’ commented Egbert, and resumed reading.
‘“I dare say the danger is imaginary; but I shall feel more at ease when he has quitted my service.”’
Egbert paused for a moment at the conclusion of the extract; then, as his uncle made no remark, he added: ‘If lack of motive was the only factor that saved Sebastien from prosecution I fancy this letter will put a different complexion on matters.’
‘Have you shown it to any one else?’ asked Sir Lulworth, reaching out his hand for the incriminating piece of paper.
‘No,’ said Egbert, handing it across the table, ‘I thought I would tell you about it first. Heavens, what are you doing.’
Egbert’s voice rose almost to a scream. Sir Lulworth had flung the paper well and truly into the glowing centre of the grate. The small, neat handwriting shrivelled into black flaky nothingness.
‘What on earth did you do that for?’ gasped Egbert. ‘That letter was our one piece of evidence to connect Sebastien with the crime.’
‘That is why I destroyed it,’ said Sir Lulworth.
‘But why should you want to shield him?’ cried Egbert; ‘the man is a common murderer.’
‘A common murderer, possibly, but a very uncommon cook.’
Dusk
Norman Gortsby sat on a bench in the Park, with his back to a strip of bush-planted sward, fenced by the park railings, and the Row fronting him across a wide stretch of carriage drive. Hyde Park Corner, with its rattle and hoot of traffic, lay immediately to his right. It was some thirty minutes past six on an early March evening, and dusk had fallen heavily over the scene, dusk mitigated by some faint moonlight and many street lamps. There was a wide emptiness over road and sidewalk, and yet there were many unconsidered figures moving silently through the half-light or dotted unobtrusively on bench and chair, scarcely to be distinguished from the shadowed gloom in which they sat.
The scene pleased Gortsby and harmonised with his present mood. Dusk, to his mind, was the hour of the defeated. Men and women, who had fought and lost, who hid their fallen fortunes and dead hopes as far as possible from the scrutiny of the curious, came forth in this hour of gloaming, when their shabby clothes and bowed shoulders and unhappy eyes might pass unnoticed, or, at any rate, unrecognised.
So bitter a thing is the heart of man.
The wanderers in the dusk did not choose to have strange looks fasten on them, therefore they came out in this bat-fashion, taking their pleasure sadly in a pleasure-ground that had emptied of its rightful occupants. Beyond the sheltering screen of bushes and palings came a realm of brilliant lights and noisy, rushing traffic. A blazing, many-tiered stretch of windows shone through the dusk and almost dispersed it, marking the haunts of those other people, who held their own in life’s struggle, or at any rate had not had to admit failure. So Gortsby’s imagination pictured things as he sat on his bench in the almost deserted walk. He was in the mood to count himself among the defeated. Money troubles did not press on him; had he so wished he could have strolled into the thoroughfares of light and noise, and taken his place among the jostling ranks of those who enjoyed prosperity or struggled for it. He had failed in a more subtle ambition, and for the moment he was heart sore and disillusioned, and not disinclined to take a certain cynical pleasure in observing and labelling his fellow wanderers as they went their ways in the dark stretches between the lamp-lights.
On the bench by his side sat an elderly gentleman with a drooping air of defiance that was probably the remaining vestige of self-respect in an individual who had ceased to defy successfully anybody or anything. His clothes could scarcely be called shabby, at least they passed muster in the half-light, but one’s imagination could not have pictured the wearer embarking on the purchase of a half-crown box of chocolates or laying out nine-pence on a carnation buttonhole. He belonged unmistakably to that forlorn orchestra to whose piping no one dances; he was one of the world’s lamenters who induces no responsive weeping. As he rose to go Gortsby imagined him returning to a home circle where he was snubbed and of no account, or to some bleak lodging where his ability to pay a weekly bill was the beginning and end of the interest he inspired. His retreating figure vanished slowly into the shadows, and his place on the bench was taken almost immediately by a young man, fairly well dressed but scarcely more cheerful of mien than his predecessor. As if to emphasise the fact that the world went badly with him the new-comer unburdened himself of an angry and very audible expletive as he flung himself into the seat.